


jawlines & leftovers

by hiroshimalovers



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M, no relationships are explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 08:26:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5490443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiroshimalovers/pseuds/hiroshimalovers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe’s hands are cold, but Finn’s are colder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	jawlines & leftovers

**Author's Note:**

> another character study in Poe

Poe dreams about Finn’s hands, his lips, his thighs, and most of all, his heart. He dreams about warm hands and warm eyes. Finn, in Poe’s mind, is warmth, is the special crinkles around Leia’s eyes when she sees he brought Han back, is the lilt in Rey’s voice when he nods at her in encouragement. Finn, in Poe’s mind, is so much more than he should be.

 

Finn is so sweet, in the dreams, and sweeter in the real world He is kind and beautiful and as flawed as anyone else, but Poe suddenly can’t imagine a world without him. Someone asks him about perfection and he thinks about strong arms and black under armour. He thinks about another man in his jacket, and the way he cheered for a cause he wanted to run from.

 

Sometimes, far too often, Finn’s warmth and soft edges melt in Poe’s dreams. They fold into sharp edges and long hair, and so much cold. Long fingers, and so much darkness. Brown eyes, but instead of warm, they are sharp, piercing. Poe doesn’t so much think the word evil as feel it.

 

Kylo Ren’s cold hands are touching his hands, his lips, his thighs, but never his heart. It’s not as much touching as ripping, not so much ripping as shredding, not so much shredding as killing. Poe isn’t dying, but sometimes he reaches out and there is no response, and sometimes he reaches out and forgets that someone ever reached back.

 

Poe wakes up and his hands are cold. He holds them out in the morning air, and they shake.

 

He goes on with life because what else is there to do? His hands are cold and they don’t shake when it matters.

 

(they only shake when he wakes up, and when it’s been almost thirty-six hours and he hasn’t slept and his brain just runs in circles with mission plans and maps and strategies and Finn lying alone in the medbay how Poe can’t touch his hands and his own chipped nails and the way he. the way he.)

 

Finn just lies there. He doesn’t move, and the only indication that he’s even still alive is the soft intake of breath, and the steady red lines of his heartbeat. Even in death, Finn is steady. Poe has to remind himself. Finn isn’t dead. He’s asleep, he’s comatose, he’s nonreactive, he’s not dead. He can’t be.

 

It’s been forty-one days since Finn fell asleep and the medbay droids whir softly around him. They take the same measurements each day at the same times, and the results are always the same. Poe knows, everyone knows, the longest he stays asleep, the less likely it is that he will ever wake up.  Each day, Poe sits by Finn’s side for a bit and tells him about the shenanigans BB-8 has pulled recently, or the latest message Rey sent. Each day, Poe feels Finn start to slip away in his memory. It’s scary, but Poe catches himself. It’s not the end.

 

If once, Finn’s monitors suddenly dip below normal for just a moment, and if Poe comes out of the medbay with red rimmed eyes and tense muscles, no one has to know. If once, General Leia caught him afterwards and touched his wrist, and said _it’ll be alright_ and really meant _his death isn’t the end of you_ , well, no one has to know that either.

 

It’s been sixteen and a half days since Rey left, and he can’t help but wonder if she would touch Finn in a way he can’t. She’s sent four messages, and they’ve all been addressed to Rebellion Base but they always end up in Poe’s shaking hands. He reads them to Finn, whispers them in the nights, and thinks of a brilliant girl who he wants so much to succeed.

 

The fifth letter, far later, reads _Rebellion Base: Keep trying._ and Poe thinks that maybe his heart aches too much for two kids who knew him too well after too short of a time. But maybe, seeing the same things, fighting the same fight, being hurt by the same hands makes a bond hard to break. Maybe it’s enough to let them believe. Maybe it’s enough to let them live.

 

Poe dreams about warm hands and warm skin, but every time he wakes up, his hands are still as cold as the air outside and his shoulders shake.

 

His hair is getting too long, and of course he cuts it. He’s called for mission after mission and of course he flies them. He screams in the night and of course he stifles it. He’s getting tired, in the way that sometimes it’s harder to fix than to live with, and of course, he ignores it.

 

It’s probably not a healthy coping method.

 

(Step one: wake up and forget how to breathe, step two: ignore that it ever happened, step three: repeat)

 

Poe tells himself that in time, he will heal, and he will stop obsessing over the way warm arms curled around him and the ice that is held in a single breath. Kylo Ren’s hands were cold. Finn’s were warm. They both lingered far too long. They still linger, and he doesn’t know whether it burns or frosts.

 

It’s been sixty-eight days since Finn fell asleep and the hope in Poe’s eyes is fading. The Resistance would never terminate him, he did too much in such a short time, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to wake up.

 

Poe wakes up one morning with the cold nipping at his fingertips and his jacket is hanging back on his door. It smells like Finn and feels like dust, like it might crumble from  his grip any second. He clutches it close to his chest and just thinks for a moment, about Rey and her determination, about Finn and his strength, and about the calm they brought to his heart.

 

It’s been twenty-two days since Rey last wrote. Poe doesn’t know if she’ll write again. He doesn’t feel like he knows much of anything anymore, except how to pilot, and fly, and follow orders, but he will do what’s expected and will try as hard as he can for everyone he knows, and once knew. He misses his friends.

 

Finn just lies there, day after day after day. Rey doesn’t write. Poe flies, and strategizes, and dreams, and has hands that are colder than ever before.

 

Mostly, he just goes through the motions every day, and jerks away when his buddy touches the side of his face. That night, he wakes up in a silent scream, feeling the ghost of icicles in his mind, and a black (blank) mask.

 

(Leia says to him _if you ever need a break, take it_  and Poe just looks at her, confused, and says _I’m sorry about any subpar performance,_ and she shakes her head but doesn’t press, because she’s General Leia and she knows so much more than she says, and is so much stronger than she shows, and he knows her heart aches too. He knows she wakes up too, knows she remembers too much and too little. He does too, but not in the same way -- she’s so strong, so so strong)

 

Finn is moved to a back room, and Rey still doesn’t write again. Poe starts to wear the jacket he gave to Finn again. He’s just keeping it warm, because there’s nothing worse than the cold anymore, because it means he is lost, it means he can’t forget, and it means there is no warmth.

 

There might never be warmth again.

 

It’s been ninety-four days since Finn fell asleep.

 

Poe’s hands are cold but he imagines Finn’s are colder.

 

Kylo Ren’s are the coldest of all.

  
(he made them this way)

(he made them this way)

(he made them this way)

 

_(lost)_

 

 


End file.
